Despite humans’ love of fantasy, fiction and fable, the duty of science is to expose or dispel fantasy as such. Still, some scientists and many others propagate a myth that we will conquer and colonize space. This idea has surfaced in the local press concerning the young lady who is on a list to colonize Mars in 2025. Of course, this project is utter nonsense.Mars has only 1 percent of the atmosphere, 38 percent of the gravity and 43 percent of the sunlight that Earth has. It has virtually no free oxygen, no liquid water nor any of the myriad resources and amenities essential to sustain human life. The futuristic enclosed-bubble space city does not remedy many of these shortcomings and belongs to the realm of science fiction.Conceivably there is an Earth-like planet, though probably unattainably distant, which at a minimum has photosynthesizing life, thus an oxygen enriched atmosphere. Such a place would undoubtedly also have many alien, and to us, toxic organisms that we would have no immunity to, thus being uninhabitable.The reality is that even a somewhat degraded Earth is still many thousands of times more conducive to human life than anywhere else in the universe. We would be wiser to plan to better care for our current planet than to fantasize about some future abode in space.DENNIS O’HAREGray